We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Daniel DennettRead
In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The limitations of human understanding persist over time, regardless of advancements in knowledge.
In this quote, Daniel Dennett reflects on the idea that, although our current understanding of the universe, particularly regarding the Big Bang, may seem advanced, it will eventually be viewed as limited. He suggests that just as Newton's understanding was confined by his era's knowledge, our own perspective is similarly constrained, and throughout history, there will always be profound questions that remain unanswered.
Themes
EpistemologyKnowledgeQuestionsUnderstandingScience
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the progression of scientific thought, this quote serves to illustrate how our understanding is always evolving.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes →Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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